


Candles in the Window

by Phoenixflames12



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Minor Character Death, Pre-Canon, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:40:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23672449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoenixflames12/pseuds/Phoenixflames12
Summary: June 1919Nightingale returns to his childhood home to find a house full of ghosts and memories.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	Candles in the Window

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by me coming away from reading False Value for the first time with more questions than answers about Thomas Nightingale and was inspired by the RoL fandom's ability to create some beautiful, heartbreaking, gut punching headcanons.

_**June 1919** _

The house is silent when he comes home from Casterbrook after their deaths. 

Ghosts wander the corridors. 

Ghosts that take the shape of Edward and Victor’s laughter that had a habit of flowing and out of each other so he could never be sure where one ended and the other began. Ghosts that are the living likeness of Geoffrey bowling cricket balls in the hall for him to prepare for the summer term at the end of the Easter holidays and failing to hide a confidential smile when they tried not to hit the family china. The warmth of his mothers’ smile, his elder sister Harriet practicing her scales in the drawing room on the concert grand, Bea and Alice squabbling about a book. 

Bea meets him on the front steps, her face set and pale under her sun hat. She looks like she is on the verge of tears but is trying to keep them at bay for his benefit and he wishes that she wouldn’t. 

Wordlessly, he steps into her embrace, his throat tight, letting the warmth and security of her touch flood through him as he had done after the last Rugger match of the autumn term when he had scored the winning try, mud splattered, elated and grinning from ear to ear. 

_‘I knew you could do it! I just knew it!’_

_Her face beaming at his as she had cupped his cheek and kissed him before passing him to their parents, his father solid and silently proud in his suit and tie, his mother quietly indulgent as she had kissed him on the cheek._

_His Mother who had died on the same night as Harriet just a few months later, fighting for each bloody breath in the bed where she had borne each of her children, clinging to her husband’s hand._

_According to his Father, his Mother’s last words before she died were ‘promise me.’_

_Promise her what?_ He thinks now as he clings to Bea, shoulders heaving, his throat heavy with the weight of the sobs, her fingers slowly, brokenly stroking his hair. 

_Harriet’s face pale and strained, her cheeks flushed and hollow under the weight of each breath._

_The weight of his sisters’ hand, her long, pianist fingers slipping in and out of his grip, her dark hair fanning out in a mane of mahogany on the pillow, her eyes wide and frightened as they roved across the sunlit shadows that fell across her room._

_‘I’m frightened, Tom!’_

_And he had held her hand tighter and had hoped that it would not happen. That the silent weeping from outside the bedroom door that could only mean one thing, was not real._

_‘It’s all right, Harrie,’ he had whispered, although at that point he hadn’t been sure if she had heard him or not._

_‘It’s going to be all right.’_

And now, crumpled in Bea’s arms, he tries not to think of his Father, or Alice, or Harriet or their Mother, or his brothers' bodies far away in mud-soaked Belgium, or the small werelight that he had conjured to hover above their sisters’ bed during that endless nocturnal vigil. 

‘Shall we go inside? Nanny’s… Nanny’s made tea in the nursery and Alice’s home,’ Bea chokes the words out and tries to smile down at him, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. 

Part of him doesn’t want to. 

Doesn’t want to walk the hall that still echoed with his brothers’ laughter or climb the stairs up to the small, cosy, achingly familiar nursery that had been the home of toasted cheese, bedtime cocoa and his brothers, when they were still young enough to be in there, telling ghost stories to scare his sisters and make Nanny scold them in the self indulgent way. 

But he knows that he must. 

Another part of him, the Casterbrook part, the part that he had thought he had left behind on the cold, achingly lonely railway carriage from Suffolk that had caught the high, treble C in chapel, had scored the winning try at the last rugger match of the season and formed formae without thinking, knows that he must. 

Alice and Nanny are occupying the two beaten squishy armchairs by the unlit fireplace. The window that overlooks the terrace and the sprawling gardens beyond which had been their mothers’ pride and joy is open, but he finds that he cannot look out. A pot of tea sits on the fender with four cups and a plate of untouched fruit cake. Thomas knows without being told that it is his Mother’s recipe, copied out painstakingly into a large, morocco leather-bound book, the size and weight of the family Bible that held all the family recipes and her cures for illnesses that did not require a doctor, all copied out in beautiful, faded copperplate handwriting and can’t bear it. 

Cannot bear to see any more ghosts, to make any more promises that everything would go back to the way it was before the war, before the telegrams from the War Office, one after the after, were handed to his parents, stating the fate of his brothers. 

_Edward dead of trench fever, mustard gas poising and grief last year, wasting himself away after he had been invalided home._

_Victor killed in action during the first week of the Battle of the Somme, his body resting in a grave marked only by blood red poppy petals fluttering in the breeze._

_Geoffrey. Geoffrey reported missing in action. His parents clinging to the fraying hope that their middle son would be out there somewhere in Europe. Would be in a field hospital in France or Belgium, under a new identity that was worn like an ill-fitting coat and would by some miracle come home some day_

‘Tom.’ His name is a breath on Alice’s lips as she crosses the room and enfolds him into a tight embrace. His middle sister wears the same haunted look that carves out Bea’s features, her hazel eyes that remind him so much of their Father huge and sorrowful, looking far older than sixteen. 

Her eyes are wide with silent questions that he does not wish to find the answers to. 

How are you?

How… How’s David?

He melts into her touch as she holds him, her hands working small, comforting motions up and down his back, her voice lapsing into soft, sweet nothings that are completely lost to the silence. 

His throat is burnt and raw, seared by the shadow of a sobbing scream, his eyes burning with tears. 

‘It’s all right,’ he hears her murmur over and over again as he squeezes his eyes shut against her breast and tries to breathe.

From somewhere in the depths of the nursery, he hears Bea make her way over to join them. 

Feels the warm weight of her draw near as she wraps an arm around his shoulder and draws Alice closer. 

‘It’s going to be all right,’ he hears her murmur fiercely into his hair and feels Alice’s strained laugh splinter like broken glass into his shoulder. 

* * *

_That night he dreams of David._

_Dreams of a grey eyed, lopsided smile and the warm weight of his friends’ hands clapping him on the back as they practiced their formae in the dormitory._

_'You’re a prodigy you know that, don’t you songbird?’_

_Dreams of beeswax polish, mud, sweat and the steady, polished tick of a wound clock, sun-kissed honeysuckle and the willow tree that spread its’ leaves over the river that tumbled at the bottom of the rugger pitch at Casterbrook._

_Dreams of a slight touch, the breath of David’s fingers lingering against the back of his hand, the reflection of those soft, grey eyes, a loosely untucked jacket, an untied school tie and a gleam of an emotion that neither of them could name yet glittering in his smile._

_Dreams of his parents as they had been at the Open Day for the Easter term accompanied by Harriet, who took in Casterbrook’s yellow sandstone gables and cloisters in wide eyed wonder. Harriet had immediately disappeared into the music room and had had come down again with wide, glittering eyes and a soft smile._

_He remembers her fingers running unconsciously over the tablecloth as they had sat down for tea, lost in the memories of the beautiful Bösendorfer._

  
_Dreams of that night- six months ago now, when he had clung to Harriet’s hand, her skin burning under his touch. Her face had lost its’ flush, instead a slow, haunting paleness had flooded her cheeks and each breath had been strained and bloody._

  
_‘Don’t… Don’t leave me, Tom,’ she’d managed to rasp out after another fit of coughing, her shoulders heaving under the weight of his hand as he had propped her up on the pillows. Her eye had been full of a fear that he wished he could prevent but knew deep down that he couldn’t._

  
_‘Shall I ask for Doctor Peters to come, Harrie? He’s with Mother now, I-‘_

  
_But she had shaken her head and smiled at him sadly, reaching out a trembling finger to trace the line of his cheek._

  
_‘There’s nothing for him to do now, Tom. Cast me a one of those… One of those lights, will you? It’ll show me where to go.’_

  
_He’d done it because she’d asked it of him, the formae trembling into shape against his palm, its glow blurring against a veil of tears as his throat ached with unchecked sobs. She had lain back, her breathing evening out into the slow, choking death rattle that he will learn to hate with all his being._

  
_They had remained there until their Father and Alice had come in, broken and hollow with grief and had told Tom to go back to bed._

* * *

He wakes to the echo of a scream searing across his throat.

  
Shadows flicker across the darkness and it takes him a long moment to orientate himself. 

  
At some point during the night, he must have kicked his coverlet away and it pools in a puddle of sweaty linen at his feet, the sheets twisted and crumpled over his ankles. 

  
The shadowy hush of a birch tree flutters against the glass of his window and from somewhere in the garden he hears the long, low call of a tawny owl. 

  
Dawn is still a long way off, the nights’ blanket over the house thick and unrelenting. 

  
Blindly, he gropes in the dark for the chorded light switch beside his bed and waits for the dim bulb to flicker into life, throwing the darkness away into stark, sharing shadows of his small bedroom and tries to breathe. 

  
Home.

He was home. 

  
Each breath tears at his lungs in a bloody, perverse reminder of Harriet’s final hours and he squeezes his eyes shut, trying to focus, trying not to think. 

  
Tries to ignore the thickness in his throat and the stabbing pains of unshed tears as he slowly begins to control his breathing. 

  
_Home._

_But it wasn’t home any more, was it?_

  
_It was the shell of a house inhabited by ghosts, ghosts that he would give anything to see again._

  
_Pale faces looming out of shadowed rooms that once radiated warmth and love and comfort in the form of cake and cricket bats and his father doing the crossword._

_Edward debating the news with Victor and their Mother, the soft melodies of Harriet’s piano practice and Geoffrey coming home from an expedition in the hills with a mud stained, bright eyed face, a terrier or two yapping at his heels. Bea and Alice quarrelling about a lost book, a Greek philosopher, some Latin prep from school._

  
_Dead eyes glistening from the windows. Dead eyes, dead, clawing hands, cold and lifeless in his own._

  
The biting, acidic tang of bile scorches his throat at that thought and he chokes it back. He desperately does not want to be sick. 

  
‘Tom? Tom, are you all right?’ 

  
Bea is in the room before he has registered the questions. 

  
Her face is muddled with sleep, her hair falling in tangled waves about her face as she scrambles onto the bed beside him, drawing him into another tight embrace. 

  
He can’t reply. 

  
Can only just think about not vomiting over the bedsheets at the force of his nightmares. 

  
‘Are you ill? Shall I call Doctor Peters?’ 

  
Bea’s face flickers in and out of the candlelight, reaching up to feel his forehead with the back of her hand for any signs of fever, her touch soft and gentle as she continues to hold him, rocking him gently as if he were a fretful child who needed sleep. 

  
He shakes his head mutely, unable to stop the tears from welling up again.

  
‘Just a… Just a nightmare,’ he whispers finally, his voice sounding small and frail, not at all his own. 

  
‘Oh Tom,’ his sister murmurs, clasping his trembling hands in hers, pressing a soft kiss in his hair with her soft, wet lips. 

  
‘Do you want me to stay with you tonight?’ 

  
He nods, unable to speak, the lump in his throat tight and unyielding. 

  
‘We’ve got each other,’ Bea says after a long, slow moment, the words breaking with choked tears and yet somehow staying resolute at the same time, running her fingers through his hair. ‘And Alice. And- And their memories. We mustn’t forget that. Ever. We’ll be all right.’ 

  
He nods into her chest as she gathers him further into her lap and they stay there, rocked into oblivion, clinging to each other as dawn slowly rises over the horizon. 

  
Much later, when the sun is fully risen and breakfast is laid out, on her way to talk to Cook about that evening’s meal Alice finds her little brother’s bedroom door ajar. Slipping inside, she cannot help but smile at the sight of the pair of them, curled like kittens in Thomas’s bedclothes in a muddle of summer sunlight. 

  
Moving slowly through the room, she kisses each in turn, smiling slowly as Bea stirs, blinking away sleep dust and tangled curls, shifting carefully as not to wake their brother, raising a quizzical eyebrow in her direction. 

  
‘Go back to sleep,’ Alice murmurs with a smile that she has been told on more than one occasion is a carbon copy of their mothers’ smile, although she has never been able to see the resemblance. ‘I’ll wake you both later.’ 

* * *

_**Fin**_

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the LLF Comment Project which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
> 
> Short comments  
> Long comments  
> Questions  
> Constructive criticism  
> "<3" as extra kudos  
> Reader-reader interaction
> 
> This author replies to comments
> 
> Note: If you don't want a reply, for any reason (sometimes I feel shy when I'm reading and not up to starting a conversation, for example) feel free to sign your comment with 'whisper' and I will appreciate it but not respond!


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